From the course: Construction Management: Concrete Construction
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Benefits and examples
From the course: Construction Management: Concrete Construction
Benefits and examples
- In the previous segments, I explained the basic principles and theory behind pre-stressed concrete. Now let's take a look at the types of structures that benefit from this type of active reinforcing. We'll start on the ground, with house foundations. In the United States, for several decades, we've used post-tensioned, pre-stressing steel installed in a flat profile, in the middle of the concrete slab to squeeze that slab together and increase it's bending strength like I discussed earlier. We do this here, because in some regions where the soil that the slab sits on contains a lot of clay, the ground swells and shrinks as it gets wet and then dries. This swelling and shrinking puts a lot of force on the slab, and it can cause it to bend and break, which is obviously not something we want, since the slab is the foundation that's holding up our house. Under these conditions post-tensioned pre-stressing can be a very economical solution to creating a slab that's stiff enough to resist…
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